WebAide Collaboration Tools: Major Updates

LuxSci has completed the major re-design of its WebAides collaboration tools; a final installment brings all WebAides up-to-date in terms of functionality and the user interface in both the Full and Xpress WebMail portals. The project to modernize our collaboration suite began more than one year ago. Of course, “final installment” is a misnomer as the job is never done — periodic feature updates are scheduled.

Significant updates include:

Notes and Links User Interfaces: These user interfaces have been updated in the Full portal for speed and ease of use. They are now consistent with all other WebAides. Links and Notes have also been updated in the Xpress portal for presentation and performance on narrow-screen mobile devices.

HTML: All WebAides now support HTML markup for notes, comments, and content areas. To make HTML usage easy, the entry editing and creation pages include visual editors similar to WebMail.

Permanent Links to Entries: All WebAides now have an option under the “Tools” submenu called “Link to this entry”. You can use this opton to return to the current WebAide and selected entry at a later time. It is also possible to send a link to a specific entry in any WebAide to anyone.

RSS 2.0 Feeds: The entries in Notes, Links, and Documents WebAides can be made public by publishing them as an RSS 2.0 feed. These feeds can be password protected and used over SSL (i.e. https://) for security. RSS feeds can be used to mash up the content of these WebAides with other feeds or to expose it in other locations. Feeds are updated within 5 minutes of any change to the underlying WebAide.

Notes feeds include either all notes or a selection of the most recent ones.

Links feeds include all links: their titles and URLs.

Documents feeds include the titles and descriptions of all documents or just the most recent ones.

New Login Destinations: Users can now specify their preferred WebAides (i.e. Blogs, Documents, Address Books, Calendars, etc.) as their “Login Destination” in preferences.

New Blogs WebAide: The “eJournals” WebAide has been renamed “Blogs” to coincide with major updates to this WebAide.